Fellowships to support Braverman’s research on conservation management

With a double helping of fellowship support, UB Law School
faculty member Irus Braverman will embark on her next project while
in residence at Cornell University during the 2013-14 academic
year.

Braverman, associate professor, has received two major
fellowships: a Society for the Humanities fellowship at Cornell,
co-sponsored by that university’s Atkinson Center for a
Sustainable Future, and a Charles A. Ryskamp Research Fellowship, a
prestigious award of the American Council for Learned Societies
that is funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

Braverman says she’s particularly excited about working
with political scientist Wendy Brown and cultural studies scholar
Judith Butler, senior scholars from the University of California,
Berkeley who also will be at Cornell in the fall.

The Society for the Humanities fellowship is structured around
the focal theme of “occupation,” and Braverman’s
proposal draws on an ethnographic study of several important
conservation institutions to explore how legal regimes facilitate
the schism between captive (occupied) and wild (unoccupied)
management.

During her time at Cornell, Braverman will be thinking and
writing about the genealogy and significance of the in situ/ex situ
dichotomy in nature conservation. Latin for “in” and
“out” of place (“situ”), this dichotomy
often stands for the dichotomy between nature and captivity. On one
end, in situ is defined as on-site, natural conservation; on the
other end, ex situ is off-site, or captive, conservation.

Working from interviews with leading conservationists, Braverman
intends to look at how those terms have been understood and how
this division has shaped the practices, models and regulation of
the animal conservation movement.

Furthermore, Braverman plans to question the simplistic division
between wild nature and civilized culture by illuminating their
interdependency. More broadly, she is considering the possibility
of conservation without nature.

Braverman says her research will focus on a few conservation
organizations that take different sides on the in situ/ex
situ question: the Conservation Breeding Specialist Group of
the International Union for Conservation of Nature, the World
Association of Zoos and Aquariums, and the Amphibian Ark. She
expects to spend part of the year doing fieldwork in various
locations, including Europe and the U.S.

The project began last summer, Braverman explains, during the
process of writing “Zooland” (Stanford University
Press, 2012), a book that describes the world of the American
Association of Zoos and Aquariums. Braverman shows how in the past
50 years, accredited zoos have come to redefine their mission from
primarily one of entertainment to one of care and stewardship. She
also describes how these zoos work cooperatively to manage their
animals. See UB
Reporter story for more on “Zooland.”

The Ryskamp fellowship will provide additional financial support
for Braverman’s work during the coming academic year.
According to its sponsor, the fellowship “recognizes those
whose scholarly contributions have advanced their fields and who
have well-designed and carefully developed plans for new
research.”

Braverman’s work, interdisciplinary in nature, draws on
her interests in law, geography, anthropology, and science and
technology studies. In addition to her Law School appointment, she
serves as an adjunct professor of geography at UB.